The story
In 1710, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published Theodicy, Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, in Amsterdam. He wrote it partly in response to the skeptic Pierre Bayle, who argued that evil is hard to reconcile with a good God, and partly out of conversations with Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia. He coined the word theodicy from the Greek for God and justice. His main argument is that among infinitely many possible worlds, an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God must have chosen the best. This world is therefore the best of all possible worlds, even though it contains suffering.
Leibniz distinguishes three kinds of evil: moral evil, or sin, which arises from free will; physical evil, or pain, which is often a punishment or a path to greater good; and metaphysical evil, the imperfection that every created thing has because it is not God. The world is a tightly connected whole, so removing any evil would alter everything. He also relied on the principle of sufficient reason, that nothing happens without a reason.
Critics said this makes evil trivial. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands, the argument seemed hard to accept, and Voltaire answered it with a poem and then with Candide in 1759, where Dr. Pangloss insists on the best of all worlds through every disaster. Kant and others kept the problem alive.
Why it mattered
- It gave the problem of evil its modern name and its most systematic rationalist answer.
- It is the target of Voltaire's Candide and fed the Enlightenment's debate about providence and suffering.
- Its possible-worlds idea became a central tool of modern logic and metaphysics.
Sources
- Leibniz on the Problem of Evil Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Theodicy Britannica
- Best of all possible worlds Britannica
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